SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

If you consider this , i.e. you suprailaic body fat (here measured by a caliper, just as it was done in the study at hand), ditching the chicken for some lamb, may be one of the myriad factors that could help you "solve" the problem. Chicken , rice and broccoli . That is still the dietary paradigm, most people have on their minds, when average Joes and Janes are talking (often with some disdain) about what "healthy eating must look like". Now, a recent study from GENUD, the "Growth, Exercise, Nutrition and Development" Research Group at the Universidad de Zaragoza in Spain (Graffe. 2013) suggests that at least item #1 on that list, namely chicken, would have been better replaced with a protein source of which I suspect even most of you won't be consuming on a regular base: Lamb! That a proper sleep hygiene is of utmost important for your health and body composition is something you , as a SuppVersity veteran will be highly familiar with (...

I guess this is about as close as we have hitherto gotten to understand why we got fat. Wrt to the hilarious pace at which we got fat and are still getting fatter, we are much better informed though. After you've learned about the general importance of exercise for your health and a couple of tweaks that may or, as in the case of sugary "energy drink", may not help you maximize the benefits and performance gains on Saturday . The focus of today's SuppVersity article is on the results of non-exercise related studies that highlight non-exercise related confounders of your health. Before we get to the actual news, I would yet like to invite all of you to take a look back at the increasingly obese history of the US... I suppose those of you who have not yet seen the link on my Facebook wall, will enjoy the animated obesity map in the Atlantic article from April 11 . I mean, even if we still don't have anything but over-simplistic cookie-cutter "explanatio...

As a diligent student of the  SuppVersity, you'll obviously know that beer is not the main cause of the eponymous belly (Bobak. 2003). Although..., when when you come to think about it: For every glass of beer you drink, you're probably drinking a glass of probiotic yogurt less ;-) You've done everything you could and still feel like a whale? You've been low-carbing, even have made sure you are in ketosis by consuming an only 10% protein diet and still the fat won't disappear? Well, I guess it sounds unfair, if I do now tell you that you YOU JUST DON'T HAVE THE GUT S it takes to get rid of that pouch that blocking the view on your toes, when you are standing. Now calm down, I am not talking about not being able to curb your insatiable appetite or skipping 90% of your workouts, here. I am talking about your gut(s), literally! Your digestive tract and it's inhabitants. Those critters which are also at the heart of the soon-to-be-published paper by scien...

You simply cannot start "working out" too early - even if it's just child's play. "Three for one!" No, I am not trying to sell you three bottles of "uberpotent" test-boosters for the rat of one. Three for one that's the SuppVersity Figure of the Week and it is the ratio of the decrease in breast cancer risk in women and the hours of physical activity per week during their adolescence. According to a 2004 review by Lagerros, Hsieh and Hsieh, each additional* hour of weekly physical activity is associated with a -3% risk of developing breast cancer later in life (Lagerros. 2004) Needless to say that the "additional" hours are in addition to the low physical activity in the laziest of the study participants, who had a 20% higher risk of developing breast cancer than their most active peers. So what else do we have today? With this primer on the importance of physical activity esp. in the critical periods of your / your child...

You lose 600x more sodium than magnesium during a workout. The RDA is yet only ~3-4x higher (Montane. 2007). If you already listened to the podcast of yesterday's installment of the SuppVersity Science Round Up (if you have not already done so, you can dowload the podcast, here ), you may have noticed that I confused the minimal potassium (K) to sodium ratio (Na), which is probably ~1:1, and the "original" K:Na ratio in the "paleo diet". According to Sebastian et al. (2002) the latter is ~8-9:1 in other words: 8-9 mols of potassium per mol of sodium. That's miles apart from the 1:2-3 ratio the average Westerner (the exact ratio varies depending on which study you refer to) uses as a springboard to hypertension ;-) The (un-)definite mineral synergism/antagonism chart Another thing you may have noticed with yesterday's show is the fact that the show was pretty "topic centered". My personal feeling is that it has a much better flow ...

Breakdance is not the only, but probably the most obvious example of the perfect synergy of "exercise" and beats per minute. Today's SuppVersity article is one of those pieces which grew organically and in fact, it was Primalkid aka Alex , who shot me a mini "True of False" item on the music and it's effect on exercise performance , a couple of days ago and thus planted the idea to revisit the effects of music on exercise performance in my brain. While Alex' mini-item was concise and to the point (see blue box towards the bottom of this article), I did remember that I had read about the ergogenic effects of music several times in the past, so I told him, I would expand his " True or False " piece "somewhat", before posting it... well, nerdy as I am, one study came to the another and I ended up with way too much information for a single " True or False " item. The SuppVersity Soundtrack of your Workout Instead of sim...